Tuesday, September 16, 2008

AutoCAD 2009 View Cube

Have you ever felt like you were lost in space?

Autodesk really came up with a winner when they decided to add the View Cube in AutoCAD 2009! Any of you who've ever worked in three dimensional drawings know just what I mean. You're drawing and moving around and somehow you think you're looking from the top when actually you're underneath your drawing! (This has the potential to mess things up in spectacular ways)

With the new view cube, that won't happen anymore.When you're in the 3D workspace, the button to turn on the Viewcube is on your home tab, in the View panel.

As you can see from the next few images, clicking on the various parts of the cube will change your view of the drawing to correspond with whatever part you picked.

Notice here I picked a corner of the cube

Here I picked one of the edges, on the side of the cube

Here I picked a face of the cube

Now watch what happens when I hit that arrow that only shows while I'm viewing the model from the side view, as you saw in the last picture. You can see from this picture how those arrows rotate your model.

And if you use 3D Orbit, the cube rotates with your model so you always know where you are. You just gotta love it.This was so easy to explain, yet it saves sooooo much hassle when you're drawing in 3D. What an elegantly simple solution!